Fall River Mayor Will Flanagan, fountain of leadership, withdrew his plan for zoning that would help hospitals hire out-of-work Fall Riverites.

He did it because he could not stand up to a few hundred “community activists” who are willing to protect their property with your poverty.

Here’s how business expansion goes in Fall River.

If you want to tear down a building, you can’t because it’s either “historic” or “iconic.” If you want to build a new building, you can’t because somebody who already HAS a job owns a house across the street and that house is “historic and iconic.”

Not that Fall River resists ALL change. If you can’t do anything else with an old building, you can always say you’ll make it into a performing arts center. People love that idea because A.) It sounds high class and B.) It won’t cost anything because it’s never going to happen.

In my 20 years of writing about Fall River we’ve had a theater in the Heritage State Park building, a theater currently rotting due to disuse, we’ve had a mayoral promise of a performing arts center on the State Pier, a possible performing arts center in the old armory and the promise of “artists living space” in every older building with the exception of my trash shed.

Don’t get excited, either. I took down my trash shed with a 9-pound hammer when the city gave us the new trash barrels. It’s too late now to preserve my “iconic” trash shed. You can’t put a performing arts center in my trash shed and you can’t protest my tearing it down and you can’t complain that airborne dust particles from my trash shed will float into your historically significant yard and cause your home’s value to plummet by 3,000 percent.

I’ll tell you one thing, if we don’t get some jobs into Fall River now, nobody’s house is gonna be worth anything.

Fifteen percent unemployment.

Fifteen percent. That’s a ghetto number. It’d be worse if people weren’t running out of Fall River so fast they’re leaving skid marks.

Fifteen percent. Is tourism gonna fix that? Are waitress and bartender jobs gonna fix that? Is a performing arts center gonna fix that? Can you fix that with a new city park? Can you fix that with a neighborhood association meeting attended by 50 people out of the 88,000 people who live here? Can you fix that with a carnival, a photo op and a bucket of soup?

Anyone who thinks I’m in the mayor’s pocket hasn’t been reading me for too long but Will Flanagan was a lot right-er on this one than were the normally tame neighborhood associations.

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At least Flanagan was right in the beginning when he tried to make it easier for the city’s two hospitals to expand. This was not a tourism idea, not a performing arts center ideal, not a photo op or bucket of soup idea. It was a solid, numbers-add-up business idea that would have let the city’s two hospitals expand “by right,” without having to take their expansion plans to the three or four part-time boards that regulate such things in Fall River.

Then, as soon as a couple hundred people with ties to neighborhood associations complained, Flanagan tucked a white flag behind each ear and folded up. This is becoming a familiar Flanagan tactic. Unlike a lot of people in Fall River, he’s got a job and he’s trying to make sure he keeps it.

Profiles in courage, baby, profiles in courage.

I’ve got a job, too, but I can’t forget the people who don’t. They’re my neighbors and friends. They matter.

Today, in Fall River, the integrity of our neighborhoods has been preserved. So has our 15 percent unemployment rate, which is “historic” and “iconic,” just like every abandoned three-decker in the city.

Here’s the truth.

If you live in a “good” Fall River neighborhood and, if the unemployment rate stays at 15 percent or better, your neighborhood cannot stay “good.” It’s not possible.

The poverty-stricken, work-deprived neighborhoods of Fall River are growing, pushing outward block by block, getting larger every year. They will arrive at your doorstep within the next 10 years. You cannot live in a “nice” house, two miles from misery, poverty and joblessness forever. It can’t last.